Many a professional woman with tell you that it has been her workplace experience to find that a thing is not considered said until a male colleague has repeated exactly what she said just a few moments earlier.

Black people working in largely white environments have spoken of a similar experience.

And this it may also be the case in dialogue between nations. The economic woes of Greece have brought to centre stage the devastation that austerity programmes cause the locals.

However, Greece’s eight years of IMF/World Bank austerity — with all the attendant bullying, diplomatic racism, condescension, and ritualised humiliations — have been the daily experience of the average Third World country for the last quarter-century or more.

Professor Yash Tandon’s book Trade is War, is an attempt to break through such silences through a forensic journey through the African/Third World experience of being Greece, long before today’s Greece also became Africa.

His is not a simple complaint or comparison. The book highlights attempts to establish a fair and just international trade regime, and how this ideal continues to be deliberately thwarted by powerful global financial industries.

At this point, Prof Tandon could have made the book even more concrete by drawing more on his personal experience in the post-Idi Amin coalition government (April 1979 to May 1980). Brief as it was, it certainly experienced hostility from Western economic “partners.”

Instead, he chooses to paint on a broader canvas, and narrate the wider story of how he became an eyewitness to, and participant in, the almost unknowable inner workings of the global trade system.

Over that period of time, he sat with presidents, held disputations with white development and trade “experts” (and was often mocked or ignored by them), learned lessons at the feet of African peasants, and fought — sometimes successfully — against unjust trade pacts.

The book is informative: Prof Tandon says the current global trade regime is a racket in which the US and wealthy nations of Western Europe hide behind biased international bodies to promote the interests of their own corporations so as to systematically rob the people of poorer countries.

He adds that the system is historically rooted in organised criminality, and maintained through a series of unequal treaties whose origin can be traced to the imposed “treaties” that followed the military defeats of native African, Arab, American and Asian people from as far back as 500 years ago.

As such, current global trade arrangements are merely an update of those terms of surrender, and in practice, amount to a continuation of the objectives of those wars.

He says this state of affairs is in a deep crisis, and must be dismantled — if not overthrown — before it brings on an ecological, social, and economic catastrophe that destroys the planet.

The author sets himself a monumental task in trying to give us a detailed explanation of the state of the current global trade regime, how it works, and who benefits and who loses from its workings.

Prof Tandon has cut through decades of diplomatic double-speak, political bamboozling and fake histories.

“To understand Africa, one must understand Europe,” he writes, “just as to understand the poor, one has to understand how the rich got rich in the first place.”

His challenge to us is to master the histories of two of three continents, a 500-year-old economic system, the evolution of international law and the creation of trade bodies.

Europe is now being forced, one country at a time, to swallow the austerity medicine that its financial system has long imposed on Africa.

Although the book has been written for Africans, it may just help the beleaguered Europeans to embrace their new status as austerity-bound, or even join the veterans in the fight against it.